That sentence up there is weird to type! Henry Rollins was—kind of still is—my guy. When I was sixteen years old, I read Get In The Van and it would not be an exaggeration to say that it shaped everything about the choices I made over the next several years. I didn’t go to college because I saw an example in Get In The Van that said, “If you know what you want to do, you should just start doing that immediately.” I started performing a weird, Rollins-esque blend of spoken word poetry and stand-up comedy because I wanted to do what he did. When I was like 19, I would rip off his bits to learn the timing and tone I wanted my own stuff to have. I listened to Black Flag and the Rollins Band, of course, but it was more than just music. Henry Rollins was the sort of person I wanted to be when I grew up.

Over the next few years, all that softened a bit. I recognized that some parts of how he saw the world, and vocalized in his performances and books, were not things that I admired or wanted to emulate. There was an element of “kill your idols” in that, too—to feel like my own person and not some hero-worshipping kid, I had to let Hank go and broaden my palate considerably. After a few years of being too cool for Rollins, though, he occupied a comfy role in the list of people I admire. He wasn’t a hero anymore, but if he’s in Austin, I’m going to the show. I literally just four days ago ordered a signed Get In The Van poster for my office. (It was $10!)

Anyway. Rollins writes a column for LA Weekly in which he opines about the world, as he does. And his most recent one is about Robin Williams. In typical Rollins-ese, it’s called “F-ck Suicide.” He’s since penned an apology, but when someone publishes a columnabout the weakness of people who commit suicide, it’s hard to take “just kidding, I don’t actually think it’s weak” at face value.

I recognize all the hallmarks of Rollins-speak in it. That sort of Nugentian bravado that embraces (and occasionally subverts) typical machismo: “I have life by the neck and drag it along. Rarely does it move fast enough.” The suggestion that you can out-tough any problem (preferably while listening to The Stooges): ”Raw Power forever.” The black-and-white breakdown of the world into categories like “weak” and “strong”: “Almost 40,000 people a year kill themselves in America, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In my opinion, that is 40,000 people who blew it.” Etc, etc.

Here’s the reason Henry Rollins should shut the f-ck up: Because he’s equating his experience of not having a disease with the experience of people who have it. It’s no more selfish or cowardly to suffer from depression—to be killed by depression—than to die from lupus.

So to hear from Henry Rollins, who is a figure whose words, at one point, were gospel to me, that you just need to crank up Iggy and gut out that disease—it makes me think about how other people who listen to him the way that I did when I was a teenager, who might well be suffering from depression, are being told that they’re just not good enough. They’re not tough enough. Raw power just didn’t come running to them. You’ve got a disease telling you that you’re not good enough in one ear, and you’ve got Henry Rollins telling you the same thing in the other. Good point, Hank!

There’s so much more to it than selfishness and cowardice, and people like Henry Rollins, who never have to think about it in any terms other than the abstract, are afforded the luxury of those judgments. They don’t have to live with it—they just get to tell people that they’ve failed.

It’s a small-minded, juvenile way to view the world. You want to put it in terms of strength and weakness, of cowardice and courage? Let’s talk about the strength and courage it takes to endure 63 years of wanting to die.

It’s not a shock to hear Henry Rollins say any of this, of course. I know his work well enough to know that this is the way he views the world, or at least that this is the way he writes about his understanding of the world. And it wouldn’t really matter—guy who was in a punk band says dumb thing on the Internet!—except that I know that there are a lot of people who’ve looked up to Rollins the way that I did, and his “tough it out” framing of a disease he doesn’t have is destructive to the people who look to him for strength. Shut the f-ck up, Hank.

]]>http://www.xojane.com/issues/why-men-need-abortion-just-as-much-as-women-dohttp://www.xojane.com/issues/why-men-need-abortion-just-as-much-as-women-doFri, 21 Jun 2013 16:30:00 GMTWhen I was 23, a young woman I knew needed an abortion. More importantly to me, so did I.

Liberal guys like me are often kind of squeamish when it comes to talking about abortion. I mean, we support it. We describe ourselves as pro-choice. We share the ridiculous things that asshole Republicans say on Facebook. (Did you hear the one about the masturbating fetus…?)

If we’re straight, and we maybe decide to join our girlfriends or wives or whatever at the rally, we’ll wear the pink or orange T-shirt they pass out, and when they chant “My body, my choice!” we will chant “Her body, her choice!” and consider ourselves allies. Look at us A-plus dudes, cisgender and incapable of becoming pregnant, out there to demonstrate for someone else’s rights! We could just stay out of it, but we care!

I know that’s how a lot of men think of abortion rights: like it’s someone else’s fight, and we might occasionally show up and offer support. And while I understand the impulse, that’s not good enough. The fact that guys like me need to realize is that abortion rights are our rights, too.

When I was 23, a young woman I knew needed an abortion. More importantly to me, so did I.

I wasn’t ready to be a father. Not in the least. I wasn’t prepared to be tied to this woman for the rest of my life. I wasn’t interested in any part of fatherhood. I had plans, and things I wanted to see, and do, and become.

I like to think that, if it had come down to it, I would have changed those plans, and taken an interest, and prepared myself. But I didn’t have to find out, because abortion was safe, affordable and accessible.

I spoke about this on the floor of the Texas Senate last week, during public testimony for a state senate bill that would be one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country. That’s bad news for the roughly 5.7 million women in Texas of reproductive age, for sure. But it’s also bad news for Texas men, too.

Yet when it came time to testify at the Texas State Capitol last week, when the state Senate debated the bill that would strip access to safe and affordable abortions from so many Texans, there weren’t a lot of fellas there to speak up.

The testimony offered to the Senate committee -– whether it came in the form of personal (often heartbreaking) stories of need and circumstances, or in fact-based indictments of the ways that the proposed bill would limit the rights of people who needed abortions to get them –- came almost exclusively from women. I think there were three guys who spoke up. There were, unsurprisingly, a lot more men who testified in support of the bill that would limit abortion access.

At some point, it starts to seem absurd: For every unmarried woman who testified about the pregnancy she was not in a position to see through, there was also a single man who was not ready to become a father. For every married woman who spoke about the life-threatening circumstances of a much-wanted pregnancy that she had to terminate, there was a man who was within a few hastily-written laws of losing his wife.

The idea that those men might think that the fight to keep abortion safe, affordable, and accessible is somehow not really their fight doesn’t make any sense at all.

The truth is, abortion rights aren’t just about women. That’s true not just because there are transgender men who are capable of becoming pregnant (though there are, and they shouldn’t be forgotten in this) but also because men like me –- straight, cisgender men who are capable of getting a woman pregnant –- also need abortion to remain accessible.

We treat abortion like it’s something men have no part in because it’s possible for men to avoid the consequences of an unintended pregnancy. For men, sometimes it’s as simple as changing your phone number. But when we talk about the responsibilities that men have in the event that they get a woman pregnant, we rarely talk about how we have to ensure that abortion remains accessible. When we don’t do that, it’s just a different form of walking away from our responsibilities.

A lot of liberal men have rightly internalized the message that a woman is the only one who gets to decide what she does with her pregnancy, but a lot of us have also taken that to mean that we don’t have a personal stake in the outcome.

There are a lot of men who aren’t ready to be fathers, just like there are a lot of women who aren’t ready to be mothers. Maybe the reasons are financial, or maybe they’re personal. Maybe raising a child isn’t part of the life plan at any point. But just like a man has a responsibility if he’s going to be a father, he also has a responsibility to make sure that not becoming a father remains an option.

Sometimes, when you’re a man who speaks up for things that are seen as women’s rights, you can come down with best-dude-ever syndrome, where you’re told by a lot of women that you’re really a great person for caring about things that men don’t typically seem to care about. But guys who speak up about abortion rights aren’t doing anything spectacular: All we’re really doing is making sure that our rights are intact, too.

]]>http://www.xojane.com/issues/the-soapbox-what-do-rape-jokes-make-rapists-thinkhttp://www.xojane.com/issues/the-soapbox-what-do-rape-jokes-make-rapists-thinkTue, 04 Jun 2013 21:00:00 GMTIn a country in which 54 percent of rapes are never reported, telling rapists that what they did isn’t a big deal isn’t pushing any limits at all. It’s the damn status quo.

The Internet Rape Joke Wars have been waged, on and off, since at least last year, when comedian Daniel Tosh responded to a woman who had challenged him during his set about the number of rape jokes he was making with, “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by, like, five guys right now?”

(The questions about rape jokes pre-date The Tosh Incident, of course, but that was the watershed moment in which those questions broke into the mainstream –- at one point, Louis CK had to go on “The Daily Show” to address a seemingly-supportive tweet that he’d made to Tosh.) Since then, the debate has heated up and cooled down, depending on what jokes comedians are making.

Most recently, it was a low-profile comic named Sam Morril, whose set was challenged in a column by feminist blogger Sady Doyle, that reignited the issue. And last week, feminist and comedian Lindy West of Jezebel took to television and debated the issue with comic Jim Norton on FX’s “Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell.”

During the 12-minute segment, West made her points, Norton made his, and a lot of people on the Internet came away from the discussion with the exact same opinion they started with.

West’s argument centered around the (mathematically hard to dispute) fact that, sitting in the crowd each night a comic performs, there’s likely to be someone who has survived a sexual assault, and these jokes are likely to make that person’s night much, much harder. That’s true, and it’s absolutely worth considering. But there’s someone else who is likely to be in that room to hear it at some point, too, and how the joke will make that person feel is important, too. I’m talking about the rapist.

No one is calling for rape jokes to be somehow banned by the Comedy Police, with a mandatory sentence in Comedy Jail for breaking the law. Few people in the discussion are even really arguing that rape jokes are never funny. (West and other feminists have compiled several examples of jokes about rape that succeed on a few different levels.)

Obviously a person can craft a joke about rape that works -– lay out a premise and then deliver a surprising, narratively-satisfying conclusion to the set-up, and the joke will probably elicit a few laughs. There: Now pro-rape-joke people don’t need to defend the art form from censorship, and they don’t need to prove that rape can too be funny. But they do need to consider the rapist who hears the joke, and hears the laughs, and ask themselves if that’s really what they want to be doing.

In the U.S. every year, 207,754 people are raped, so there are also a whole bunch of people committing those rapes. What that means is that any comic who regularly performs in front of an audience is likely to spend at least some time telling jokes to someone who’s raped someone. And when he hears a joke like Tosh’s, that starts with “How can a rape joke not be funny?!” and goes on to say that a woman who interrupts him deserves to be raped –- or a joke like Morril’s (“My ex-girlfriend never made me wear a condom… She was on the pill: Ambien!”) –- he’s probably going to feel pretty comfortable in that room.

When he hears the laughs in response to Morril’s joke, he’s not liable to feel shame about the night the girl from the bar passed out when he got her upstairs; he’s probably going to feel like he’s surrounded by a bunch of people who agree that what he did wasn’t really a big deal. He’s going to be reassured that he’s not in a society that takes it seriously.

And when feminists say that rape jokes contribute to rape culture, this is a big part of what they mean: That if you send rapists the message that what they did is normal, and something we can all laugh about –- the way that jokes like Morril’s and Tosh’s do –- then the next time they’re with a woman who’s too drunk to say yes, they’re going to know that they’ve already got some implicit approval for whatever they choose to do.

So when I –- and presumably a lot of other people who think that Tosh, Morril, and the rest of the rape-jokes-are-hilarious crowd are assholes -– get upset about the jokes, it’s not that I’m offended. I’m really hard to offend. It’s that I’m mad that the person had a mic in their hand, and a whole room full of people listening to them, and they decided that the way they were going to make them laugh was to tell a joke that would made a rapist feel better about himself.

When we talk about pushing boundaries or being edgy or testing taboos or whatever -– when we bring names like George Carlin and Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor into this discussion -– what people who argue the pro-rape-joke side miss is that, in a country in which 54 percent of rapes are never reported, telling rapists that what they did isn’t a big deal isn’t pushing any limits at all. It’s the damn status quo.

Ultimately, the question of comedians making the sort of rape jokes that comfort rapists isn’t really a matter of can they make those jokes, or even a question of should they. It’s your mic, man, you can do whatever you want to do while you’re holding it. The question is, if you’ve got that mic in your hand, why do you want to use it to make rapists feel better?

]]>http://www.xojane.com/sex/guy-talk-men-dont-want-to-have-sex-all-the-timehttp://www.xojane.com/sex/guy-talk-men-dont-want-to-have-sex-all-the-timeFri, 25 Jan 2013 19:30:00 GMTHere is a confession: I am a dude, and sometimes I don’t want to have sex. For good reasons, or no reasons at all. It just depends.

Here is a confession: I am a dude, and sometimes I don’t want to have sex. For good reasons, or no reasons at all. It just depends.

I know that’s not actually shocking, but bear with me here, because that is somehow still a radical thing to admit. It’s still the default assumption about men, still casually reinforced basically every day. And women explicitly get told that it’s true, by men, even when they’re asked directly.

Here’s just one recent example, from Cosmopolitan‘s “Ask Him Anything” column, in response to a question about why a woman’s husband wants to do it the moment they check into a hotel room anywhere: “Guys pretty much want sex no matter where they go -– work, the mall, funerals, etc,” the “Him” who writes the column says, before explaining that a hotel room is just a part of that endless chain.

Now, there are a whole bunch of reasons why her husband may want to have sex right away when they check into a room, but here’s the thing: None of those reasons have anything to do with my dick, or anybody else’s. So why do we constantly get dragged into it when someone is talking about the male sex drive like it’s a universal constant? And who gets screwed over by this really shallow understanding of male sexuality?

The second question is easy to answer: If you had “Men, and everybody who has sex with men” in the pool, then go collect your prize. (It’s the possibility of a less fucked-up sex life.)

The answer to the first question, though, is complicated. Virility is prized in most cultures, through most time periods. People also learn about sex, and the male sex drive, during their teen years, and it’s likely that a fella is going to be hornier in his teen years than he is as he matures -- so people who have sex with men, and the men themselves, tend to base their idea of what men’s attitudes about sex are based on what they exhibit during those years.

In other words, this isn’t strictly a product of marketing that benefits from treating every social interaction as an understood agreement that a woman’s value on her ability to give men boners, or a culture that portrays the ideal of version as a perpetual adolescence. But once you factor those things into it, hoo boy.

What you end up with when you add all of those things up is a world in which just about everybody is confused about sex and feels like they’re doing it wrong. So much of the sex dynamics between men and women expects women to be chaste, and men to win sex as a prize. And what kind of man doesn’t want to get a prize all the time?

That’s the sort of question that makes this stereotype so destructive to men (and, by extension to women) -- when it’s agreed upon as a society-wide given that part of being a man is wanting sex constantly, then there’s a lot of pressure to meet that, in order to prove -- to others, to yourself -- that you are, in fact, a real man.

Maybe that means writing in advice column that all men want to do it all the time, even at a funeral. Maybe that means pressuring your wife to have sex with you every time you check into your hotel room. Whatever it is, it’s a real pressure. Like, even while I’m writing this, I’m anticipating comments suggesting that my problem is just that I can’t get it up and there’s something wrong with me. The editors may well have to remove a parenthetical “but I totally get awesome boners, for real” that I feel compelled to sneak in here to clarify.

And when that pressure is put on men, that pressure ends up on anybody who has sex with men, too. It’s on the woman whose husband wants her to go for it the second they walk into a hotel room, but it’s also on the woman who is with a guy who’s not getting hard when they’re getting intimate.

If a man is supposed to want it all the time, and he doesn’t want it when he’s with her, then there’s something wrong with at least one of them. Either he’s failing as a man, or she’s letting him down. A lot of the time, they probably both end up feeling like shit.

Which is the point of continuing to talk about this stereotype, even though most people, if they stop to think about it for a minute can probably recognize is inherently stupid: “All men” don’t want anything. “All men” won’t agree on anything at all, especially not something as personal, complicated, or idiosyncratic as sex, and the notion that we might is absurd.

Some guys want to have sex more often than others. Sometimes even guys who want to have sex a lot of the time aren’t into it for whatever reason. There’s nothing wrong with any of that.

It should be obvious, but somehow it isn’t. As long as men keep pretending like they can speak for everyone — when they may well not even be speaking for themselves — then men and women are going to stay confused. So let’s be real, dudes. I’ll start.

]]>http://www.xojane.com/issues/why-a-straight-man-like-me-cares-about-transgender-rightshttp://www.xojane.com/issues/why-a-straight-man-like-me-cares-about-transgender-rightsTue, 22 Jan 2013 23:00:00 GMTI am a dude who is straight and cisgender (that is, someone whose gender identity matches their biology) and who seems to have no stake in this fight. Here’s why I take transgender issues personally.

Over the weekend, the UK’s Observer published an editorial about transgender people that crossed a bunch of lines. It’s not really worth repeating the things that the author wrote, but they included the sort of slurs that, if used against, say, black people or women, would make your eyes pop out.

The Observerhas since removed it, but it was full of “N-word” level stuff, with an editorial tone dripping with self-righteous, “if you don’t want to be called these things, stop being the way you are” privilege.

It was gross, in other words. I tweeted about it throughout the day on Sunday, when it ran, as I learned more about the author or different things occurred to me. Most of the rest of my tweets from that day were about football, which meant that I got some confused replies from people who follow me because they like when I make fun of Matt Schaub.

I’m not transgender, and I don’t have any close friends or family who are, so why was I treating that editorial like it was personal? I am a dude who is straight and cisgender (that is, someone whose gender identity matches their biology) and who seems to have no stake in this fight.

Here’s why I take transgender issues personally.

Because I or someone I love might get cancer at some point, and a trans person who is capable of discovering the cure is otherwise occupied defending their right to exist.

I live in a world that needs leadership, and a smart, tireless trans person who should maybe be President is busy arguing that they deserve basic human respect.

I want to drive a fucking flying car someday, and the trans person who might invent it is stuck responding to Observereditorials that treat them like they’re subhuman.

All of which is to say that this is about more than compassion. Compassion is important, and straight, white cisgender dudes like me ought to have a very strong sense of it, since everyone else tends to treat us pretty well (at least when compared to people from similar backgrounds who aren’t those things).

But it goes beyond compassion. Compassion is good, but compassion also means that it’s always someone else’s struggle.

But these fights aren’t anyone else’s struggle. They’re mine, too. They belong to all of us because the only way the world ever gets better is when people are able to use their talents to make better things for the rest of us to enjoy. And that doesn’t happen much when those talented people are busy fighting for their own survival.

There’s a part in The Autobiography of Malcolm X where he talks about a bookie named West Indian Archie, who kept all of the numbers in his head. In the book, he writes, “I’ve often reflected upon such black veteran numbers men as West Indian Archie. If they had lived in another kind of society, their exceptional mathematical talents might have been better used.”

Not only are their fewer opportunities for trans people to do important work at a high level because of the bigotry that they already face, but when you have to spend so much of your time demanding basic dignity, it’s hard to have enough left afterward to do the other things that are worth doing. It’s relatively easy for a person like me to succeed, because nobody’s attacking me; I can spend all of my creative energy on whatever it is I’m interested in. Self-defense is not really a part of my life.

That’s not the way that it is for everybody, though. Trans people, this weekend, were reminded by a major, supposedly progressive newspaper that a lot of people in the world saw them as undeserving of basic dignity as human beings, in no uncertain terms.

Other people -– women, people of color, gay people, people with disabilities –- get those messages every day, too, and use their energy pushing back against them. In another kind of society, they’d be able to focus on other things, and we would all benefit.

I know that I’m never going to cure cancer or discover a process that converts carbon emissions into funk-soul hits from the ’70s or whatever. But I can speak up when things like that Guardian editorial go out into the world.

That way, someone who’s exhausted from having to constantly assert that they have a right to exist can relax for a minute when they see that there are other people who have their backs, and go do whatever else it is that they want to do. That’s the world I want to live in.

]]>http://www.xojane.com/it-happened-to-me/i-lost-a-job-for-calling-out-the-companys-rape-apologyhttp://www.xojane.com/it-happened-to-me/i-lost-a-job-for-calling-out-the-companys-rape-apologyMon, 26 Nov 2012 16:00:00 GMTMaking the point that people with jobs in journalism have no business speculating about the truthfulness of rape allegations is well worth losing some steady work over.

As a straight white dude living a fairly middle-class existence, who is fortunate to have no firsthand experience with rape, it’s been pretty easy for me to live my life without giving it much thought. I spend almost no energy thinking about the safest route to take when walking home, or what might happen to my drink if I step away from it, or who I should or shouldn’t accept a ride home with.

I’m not bragging, though. It turns out that even a guy like me is susceptible to some of the side-effects of living in a culture that treats every reported rape as a cause to throw two trials in the court of public opinion: One in which there’s someone who may or may not be guilty of rape, and one in which there’s someone who may or may not be guilty of lying.

That’s how the story has shaken out in the case of Ryan Romo, an 18-year-old star baseball prospect from the ritzy Dallas neighborhood of Highland Park (where George W. and Laura Bush lived before W. farted into the Texas Governor’s Mansion and then the White House). Here’s what we know for sure: After a Ghostland Observatory concert in Dallas a few weeks ago, Romo gave a girl -- younger than seventeen -- a ride home from the show; two days later, she filed charges for sexual assault.

Here’s what else we know for sure: Shortly after those charges were filed, the Dallas edition of a Texas-based media site called CultureMap ran a story with the headline, “Is this Highland Park baseball star a rapist?” In the story, the author -- CultureMap Dallas’ managing editor, Claire St. Amant -- speculates that perhaps the girl in question is lying about what happened (“Kids are supposed to mess up. They lie. They cheat. They get caught. They grow up. But throw a sex act in the mix, and childish ways are all but left behind,” she writes).

The story doesn’t cite any details of the case that make questioning this girl’s story a logical progression, nor does it explain what motive she might have to lie except that “kids are supposed to.” It does end with the sentence, ““If it's a case of impulsive teenage decisions, remorse and guilt, then no one suffers more than 18-year-old Ryan Romo.”

If that’s not the case, of course -- and we have no reason to suspect that this girl is lying -- then we know one person who suffers more than Ryan Romo, for sure. It’s the one who was raped in the back of an SUV by an older boy and who subsequently watched as grown-ups with legitimate jobs in the press decided to speculate wildly on whether or not she was a liar.

I paid close attention to the way the case of Ryan Romo and the girl who accused him of raping her was reported by CultureMap because I’ve been a regular columnist, on a freelance basis, to the outlet’s Austin and Houston editions since March 2011. I’ve worked with good people within the company during that time, and I’d never met or interacted with anyone at the Dallas edition. I was proud of the work I’d done -- and until Claire St. Amant’s editorial ran, I had been happy to have my name associated with CultureMap.

But the downside of having your name associated with someone else’s is that your name is associated with the fucked up things that they do, too. And speculating about whether a teenager who has filed rape charges is a liar, when you have no facts in the case to report, is a textbook example of a fucked up thing to do.

I don’t give a whole lot of thought to whatever my “personal brand” as a writer is, but if I had to pinpoint it, “Guy with enough credibility to call out people who say or do fucked up things” would be a fair approximation of what I’m going for. At the time the post about Ryan Romo went live on CultureMap, my face was on the main page of the site, which meant that it’d be reasonable for people to associate me with that post –- unless I said something.

I keep a personal blog on Tumblr, and I posted a clarification explaining both that I had nothing to do with the post about Ryan Romo, and that I recognized it as a fucked-up thing.

When you’re a dude who identifies as a feminist, it’s really easy to be harsh when you’re picking on an easy target –- to really lay into, like, Ben Roethlisberger or Chris Brown –- and to quietly fall back on your privilege when things are a little closer to home. I didn’t want to be that sort of guy, so it was important to me to make my post very clear, and use the same language I’d have used if we were talking about Todd Akin. “I’m really disappointed in CultureMap’s choice to publish such offensive -- and stupid! -- bullshit,” I wrote. That way, people who knew me from my work with CultureMap would not have to wonder if I was secretly cool with treating people who say they’ve been raped as probable liars, as long as the person saying it also wrote me checks.

After about a week, though, I got an email from my editors at the Austin edition of CultureMap. The Dallas higher-ups had found the post on Tumblr. They asked me to meet them for coffee, at which point they explained to me that the company wanted me to take the post down.

Like most writers, being told that I’m not allowed to say something is the quickest way to make me defend having said it, and I told them that I couldn’t take it down. They told me that the company was upset, and they wouldn’t be able to work with me if I didn’t. I reached out to Claire St. Amant directly to discuss what both of us had written, didn’t hear anything back, and wrote off my relationship with CultureMap.

Obviously, I’m not a victim here (“No one suffers more than freelance writer Dan Solomon!”), but this whole experience was eye opening for me. CultureMap is a not-insignificant player in Texas media, and the idea that a company would let go of someone they’ve worked with for a long time for saying, “Speculating about whether a girl who files rape charges is a liar without reporting any information that leads to that conclusion is irresponsible!” while so steadfastly defending the article that does the speculating was a surprise.

All I’m losing is a little bit of work, but that’s mostly a function of the privileges that I enjoy as a dude who is rather unlikely to be raped. No one accuses me of being too emotionally invested in this case to see it properly; no one suspects that I identify too strongly with the girl who filed the charges against Romo; no one can call me anything over this that can ruin my life or make me hate myself.

The girl in Highland Park who accepted the ride home from Ryan Romo, though? She doesn’t have those privileges. I don’t have any idea what happened in the back of Romo’s SUV, but I also know that there are 96 comments on the CultureMap post, and a bunch of those people are pretty sure that they know: “The girl’s a complete liar,” one reads. “Her mother was probably livid at her for coming in so late at night and she claimed rape to get out of trouble.”

I don’t know if the person who posted that comment lives in Highland Park, but I do know that plenty of people who do live in the same community as Romo and the girl in question will have read that story on CultureMap. And when they do –- when Romo’s friends, or people invested in defending him and his family (his father is the CEO of the Dallas-based restaurant chain Eatzi’s), or classmates of the girl who are inclined to treat her like a slut and a liar for whatever reason, read the unfounded, unsourced speculation on a seemingly-legitimate media outlet –- they’ll feel completely validated in hurling accusations toward the girl every day. I honestly can’t imagine how unpleasant it’s been for her in the hallways the past few weeks.

Given that CultureMap and Claire St. Amant never had any reason to speculate that this was “a case of impulsive teenage decisions, remorse, and guilt” except that it was theoretically possible to do so, it’s pretty obvious that, of all the people who “no one suffers more than” as a result of her column, Ryan Romo isn’t even on the list.

And making the point that people with jobs like mine and St. Amant’s have no business speculating like that is well worth losing some steady work over.